The Heritage Foundation despises anything like actual ‘heritage’: “Residents of the United Kingdom have indeed experienced a dramatic shrinkage in the size of their homes as a result of restrictive land use and housing regulations enacted in 1947 to dis­courage suburbanization and preserve the rustic countryside.” Fools.

Mo products, mo safety problems: “For anyone who remembers biking through childish eyes, it is a very different bit of business on busy roads … The tires get very small [on their own?], the slight protection offered by the best [?] helmet very feeble … I fell, almost into traffic, three times due to my unfamiliarity with clip-on shoes [wtf], and scraped raw elbows and knees on my left side.” Or you could ride a simple, steady bicycle on safe routes, without a showcase show­down of aspirational safety and performance gadgets where safety is the evident loser. We’d rather be childish and go places without falling onto busy roads.

Not bad, Key West: “There is no typical cyclist here. It might be a drag queen, a tourist, or, as I once saw, a guy smoking, with a big John McCain sign.”

Did you ever think that proud political ‘centrists’ who claim allegiance with the party in power but who never uphold that party’s principes (or ‘ideology’) when it matters might just be in this game for, you know, power? Blue Dog Democrat Has Own Towne Hall, Sets Own Rules

Safety Serf: “This is the most pervasive and perverse assumption permeating national security discus­sions: that we cannot Stay Safe and simultan­eously have a government that abides by the law. … If one really thinks about it, it’s a truly magnificent achieve­ment for the Government to have convinced its citizenry that they must be allowed to break the law if the citizens want to survive.”

Truth, truther, truest: “And, hey, it is not acceptable among actual elite liberals plotting in their liberal caves to say that ‘Dick Cheney plotted 9/11 himself because he wanted a Reichstag excuse to go to war against Iraq.’ What it is acceptable to say, because it is true, is that ‘George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ignored the intelligence that might’ve helped them stop 9/11, because they were more concerned with non-threats like Iraq, and once 9/11 happened they not only completely botched their response but they then cynically exploited that tragedy to move against Iraq, which they’d been planning to do beforehand anyway.’”

Tea-baggers dismayed that the D.C. Metro does not have higher capacity on the one day they need to use it. It costs money, you guys.

This week Kunstler riffs on his suburban apocalyptic theme with uncharacteristic rhetorical self-control: “In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.” Does he want us to put this on our facebook or something? Sellout.

Radical: “Tired of your flabby butt and warming earth? In Our Shocking Special Report We investigate the mysterious benefits of using your body to transport yourself to the grocery store.”

High Speed Fail: “This week, Taiwan High-Speed Rail fully revealed its fiscal impotency; the national government will have to take over the operating company, three years after the project opened to the public.” That’s one way to get the large public investment and ongoing commitment that HSR requires. { related }

Priorities: “The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Haillburton each day during the war in Iraq.”

Deferred Judgment “The situation is similar elsewhere in the country, where Amtrak owns about 1,400 bridges, largely in the Northeast. Lacking money to meet all of its repair and maintenance needs, Amtrak has deferred an estimated $5 billion in capital and infrastructure maintenance spending.”

Their bike snob is better than our bike snob: “Join Transportation Alternatives and the Consulate General of Denmark for a very special Member Drinks event on Monday September 28 from 6-9 pm at the City Bakery. Guest speaker Mikael Colville-Andersen of Copenhagenize.com is an evangelist of ‘cycle chic’ and Denmark’s number one bicycle ambassador and advocate for sustainable transportation.”